“’China is here’: Structural justice claims and shifting Sinophobia in Kyrgyzstan’s mining sector”

In Kyrgyzstan, nationalist policy discourses, corporate PR, and anti-mining activism do, at times, intermingle to co-create some anti-Chinese mining sentiments, including popular mythologizing about a Chinese resource grab. However, our research reveals that in mining development areas, anti-Chinese sentiments were secondary to extractivism anxieties, the entangled environmental and economic worries that community members regularly and continuously express. Likewise, Sinophobic attitudes are shifting over a period in which the industrial presence of companies originating from China has grown, despite scholarly and elite arguments that these sentiments are residents’ foundational rationalizations for opposing mining. This contradiction means that ethno-nationalism—and the “resource nationalism” charge—does not explain resistance well over time. Over several decades of extractivism in Kyrgyzstan, residents’ arguments against exploitation, and their notions of environmental justice and economic equity, remain constant. While extractive industries remain non-transparent in terms of environmental damage and hiring policies, what has shifted is popular perceptions of the state and its new assertion of control over mining governance. Since 2021, a turn in government rhetoric and action toward China is noticeable, with a more positively constructed relationship but also an assertion of state sovereignty over territory and the activity of foreign firms. The resulting protest quiet is not an indication of universal happiness with extractivism in its current form, but rather a recognition of increased state power and public awareness that under Kyrgyzstan’s current government it is better to cooperate. In this article, we explain long-term field research observations about protests against Chinese-run mining facilities in the Kyrgyz Republic from 2009 to 2025, in a country with widespread local opposition to extractive industries. Through qualitative research conducted in different communities—dissecting discourses used by government officials, industry representatives and protesters, in media reports and public opinion surveys—we identified nuanced and shifting views about Chinese economic engagement and investments.